The old man went with him up the creek and, passing the milk house,
turned up a brush-bordered little branch in which the engineer saw signs
of coal. Up the creek the mountaineer led him some thirty yards above
the water level and stopped. An entry had been driven through the
rich earth and ten feet within was a shining bed of coal. There was no
parting except two inches of mother-of-coal--midway, which would make it
but easier to mine. Who had taught that old man to open coal in such a
way--to make such a facing? It looked as though the old fellow were in
some scheme with another to get him interested. As he drew closer, he
saw radiations of some twelve inches, all over the face of the coal,
star-shaped, and he almost gasped. It was not only cannel coal--it was
“bird's-eye” cannel. Heavens, what a find! Instantly he was the cautious
man of business, alert, cold, uncommunicative.
“That looks like a pretty good--” he drawled the last two words--“vein
of coal. I'd like to take a sample over to the Gap and analyze it.” His
hammer, which he always carried--was in his saddle pockets, but he did
not have to go down to his horse. There were pieces on the ground that
would suit his purpose, left there, no doubt, by his predecessor.
“Now I reckon you know that I know why you came over hyeh.”
Hale started to answer, but he saw it was no use.
“Yes--and I'm coming again--for the same reason.”
“Shore--come agin and come often.”
The little girl was standing on the porch as he rode past the milk
house. He waved his hand to her, but she did not move nor answer. What a
life for a child--for that keen-eyed, sweet-faced child! But that coal,
cannel, rich as oil, above water, five feet in thickness, easy to mine,
with a solid roof and perhaps self-drainage, if he could judge from the
dip of the vein: and a market everywhere--England, Spain, Italy, Brazil.
The coal, to be sure, might not be persistent--thirty yards within it
might change in quality to ordinary bituminous coal, but he could settle
that only with a steam drill. A steam drill! He would as well ask for
the wagon that he had long ago hitched to a star; and then there might
be a fault in the formation. But why bother now? The coal would
stay there, and now he had other plans that made even that find
insignificant. And yet if he bought that coal now--what a bargain! It
was not that the ideals of his college days were tarnished, but he was
a man of business now, and if he would take the old man's land for
a song--it was because others of his kind would do the same! But why
bother, he asked himself again, when his brain was in a ferment with a
colossal scheme that would make dizzy the magnates who would some day
drive their roadways of steel into those wild hills. So he shook himself
free of the question, which passed from his mind only with a transient
wonder as to who it was that had told of him to the old mountaineer, and
had so paved his way for an investigation--and then he wheeled suddenly
in his saddle. The bushes had rustled gently behind him and out from
them stepped an extraordinary human shape--wearing a coon-skin cap,
belted with two rows of big cartridges, carrying a big Winchester over
one shoulder and a circular tube of brass in his left hand. With his
right leg straight, his left thigh drawn into the hollow of his saddle
and his left hand on the rump of his horse, Hale simply stared, his eyes
dropping by and by from the pale-blue eyes and stubbly red beard of the
stranger, down past the cartridge-belts to the man's feet, on which
were moccasins--with the heels forward! Into what sort of a world had he
dropped!
“So nary a soul can tell which way I'm going,” said the red-haired
stranger, with a grin that loosed a hollow chuckle far behind it.
“Would you mind telling me what difference it can make to me which way
you are going?” Every moment he was expecting the stranger to ask his
name, but again that chuckle came.
“It makes a mighty sight o' difference to some folks.”
“But none to me.”
“I hain't wearin' 'em fer you. I know YOU.”
“Oh, you do.” The stranger suddenly lowered his Winchester and turned
his face, with his ear cocked like an animal. There was some noise on
the spur above.
“Nothin' but a hickory nut,” said the chuckle again. But Hale had
been studying that strange face. One side of it was calm, kindly,
philosophic, benevolent; but, when the other was turned, a curious
twitch of the muscles at the left side of the mouth showed the teeth and
made a snarl there that was wolfish.
“Yes, and I know you,” he said slowly. Self-satisfaction, straightway,
was ardent in the face.
“I knowed you would git to know me in time, if you didn't now.”
This was the Red Fox of the mountains, of whom he had heard so
much--“yarb” doctor and Swedenborgian preacher; revenue officer and,
some said, cold-blooded murderer. He would walk twenty miles to preach,
or would start at any hour of the day or night to minister to the
sick, and would charge for neither service. At other hours he would be
searching for moonshine stills, or watching his enemies in the valley
from some mountain top, with that huge spy-glass--Hale could see
now that the brass tube was a telescope--that he might slip down and
unawares take a pot-shot at them. The Red Fox communicated with spirits,
had visions and superhuman powers of locomotion--stepping mysteriously
from the bushes, people said, to walk at the traveller's side and as
mysteriously disappearing into them again, to be heard of in a few hours
an incredible distance away.
“I've been watchin' ye from up thar,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“I seed ye go up the creek, and then the bushes hid ye. I know what
you was after--but did you see any signs up thar of anything you wasn't
looking fer?”
Hale laughed.
“Well, I've been in these mountains long enough not to tell you, if I
had.”
The Red Fox chuckled.
“I wasn't sure you had--” Hale coughed and spat to the other side of his
horse. When he looked around, the Red Fox was gone, and he had heard no
sound of his going.
“Well, I be--” Hale clucked to his horse and as he climbed the last
steep and drew near the Big Pine he again heard a noise out in the
woods and he knew this time it was the fall of a human foot and not of a
hickory nut. He was right, and, as he rode by the Pine, saw again at its
base the print of the little girl's foot--wondering afresh at the reason
that led her up there--and dropped down through the afternoon shadows
towards the smoke and steam and bustle and greed of the Twentieth
Century. A long, lean, black-eyed boy, with a wave of black hair over
his forehead, was pushing his horse the other way along the Big Black
and dropping down through the dusk into the Middle Ages--both all
but touching on either side the outstretched hands of the wild little
creature left in the shadows of Lonesome Cove.